Joseph Smith’s Wives: The Women, In Their Own Words

One legal wife — Emma Hale Smith — and an estimated 30 to 40 plural wives sealed to him between roughly 1833 and November 1843. Historian Todd Compton documents 33 with confidence; Brian Hales counts 35. The number is a range because a few sealings rest on late or secondhand evidence, while most are documented by the women’s own affidavits.

Emma Hale, whom he married legally on January 18, 1827, in South Bainbridge, New York. Emma was his only legal wife, the mother of his children, the first Relief Society president, and was sealed to him for eternity in May 1843. His first plural wife was Fanny Alger, sealed in Kirtland, Ohio, in the mid-1830s.

From 14 to 58 at the time of sealing. Helen Mar Kimball, sealed in May 1843, was fourteen; Rhoda Richards, sealed the following month, was fifty-eight. About ten wives were under twenty; most were in their twenties and thirties, and several were widows or married women over forty-five.

Yes — Helen Mar Kimball, sealed in May 1843, three months before turning fifteen, in an arrangement proposed through her father. Helen wrote that she understood it as a sealing “for eternity alone,” and historians find no evidence of consummation, while noting that her age and the family dynamics are precisely what make the case the record’s hardest. Our Helen Mar Kimball profile takes it in full.

Yes — roughly a dozen had living husbands when they were sealed to Smith, including Zina Huntington Jacobs, Patty Sessions, Sylvia Sessions Lyon, Mary Rollins Lightner, and Ruth Vose Sayers. In every documented case the woman remained with her husband and family; historians debate whether these eternity-focused sealings involved marital relations, with no direct evidence that they did.

None have ever been confirmed. DNA studies led by geneticist Ugo Perego have tested the descendants of the leading claimed cases — including Josephine Lyon, whose 2016 result identified Windsor Lyon as her father — and excluded Joseph Smith in every completed test. His nine documented children were all with Emma.

Most were re-sealed to him by proxy in the Nauvoo temple in early 1846 while marrying other men for this life — most often Brigham Young or Heber C. Kimball — and migrated to Utah. Several became major figures: Eliza R. Snow and Zina D. H. Young each led the church’s Relief Society. Others, like Fanny Alger and Agnes Coolbrith, left the church. The last surviving wife, Mary Rollins Lightner, died in 1913.

Extensively — it is the main reason the marriages are documented. Dozens signed affidavits in 1869–70, several wrote autobiographies or gave interviews into the 1900s, and in 1892 three wives — Emily Partridge, Malissa Lott, and Lucy Walker — testified under cross-examination in the federal Temple Lot case. Their accounts include both firm defenses of the principle and frank descriptions of its difficulty.

The youngest was Helen Mar Kimball, fourteen at her May 1843 sealing; Nancy Winchester was fourteen or fifteen the same year. The oldest was Rhoda Richards, fifty-eight when sealed in June 1843. The oldest previously widowed wife, Fanny Young — Brigham Young’s sister — was fifty-six at the last known sealing, November 2, 1843.

Yes — the record card on this page carries every documented wife with her age at sealing, drawn from the Joseph Smith Papers, Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness, and Brian Hales’s documentation. Counts range from 33 (Compton) to 35 (Hales) documented wives, within the traditional 30–40 estimate.

No wife is documented to have done so — historian Brian Hales notes that even the wives who left the faith never wrote an exposé or accused him of abuse or deception. Historians add the caveat that the marriages’ secrecy and the social cost of speaking shaped what survives; the accounts we do have, from believers and former believers alike, describe the marriages as real and religious.

Four collections: sworn affidavits gathered from the wives around 1869–70, Andrew Jenson’s 1887 published list in the Historical Record, the 1892 Temple Lot depositions, and the women’s own memoirs and interviews — organized by modern studies from Todd Compton (33 documented wives) and Brian Hales (35), and by the Joseph Smith Papers’ person-by-person documentation.